Tag It & Bag It: Ruth Burr Reedy Wants You to Conquer Your Data

Google Tag Manager loves you and wants you to be happy

There are some things that can’t be measured. Love. Longing. The aching need for a cheeseburger. But you know what can be measured? What folks do on your site. That’s why Google, in its wisdom, created the Google Tag Manager (GTM). And that’s why Ruth Burr Reedy, in her even-wisdomier wisdom, hit DFW from OKC to talk GTM to DFWSEM.

It was a big crowd, but not quite packed. There was a seat for you. And are you ever gonna wish you were in it.

Opening Act

It’s fair to say Ruth is well-regarded, and that people were looking forward to her presentation with an appropriate level of decorum.

But before she took the stage, some other excellence. First up, some exciting news from State of Search. (You have your ticket, right?) This year, it will also be State of Research, featuring the release of original research and information vital to your digital marketing needs. Keep your eyes peeled for more details, y’all, because this is going to be resplendent mojo. And speaking of resplendent, Justin Liles of DFWSEM sponsor Advice Local, who has truly resplendent eyewear, gave a short primer on how to clean up data, even huge piles thereof.

See? You wish you were there, don’t you?

Main Event

But it was when Ruth took the stage things really got fast and furious.

When you aim your browser at a URL, it toddles off and gathers up all the components of that site, assembles them, and presents them to you. All these component parts are called the Document Object Model, or DOM. Yes. Exactly like Vin Diesel’s character in the movies that go zoom and boom. The DOM is a tree-like directory of all the objects on a site.

If you want to track how people interact with all these objects – and you do – then you add tags, little bits of JavaScript that send out info about those interactions. The problem? They pretty much have to live in the head of your site, where they can cause code bloat and slow things down.

Enter GTM. It’s a box of tags that sits in your site head. You can add things to or remove things from the box without 1) bothering your developer, or 2) slowing down your load times.

So how do you get GTM goodness on your site? If you’re in WordPress, there’s plugins. If you have to bother your dev and get them to do it, at least you only have to bother them once, and then you can use Screaming Frog or a similar program to make sure it’s on each page. Then you can get to work.

But wait. A couple of things to consider before you go tagging.

But wait. A couple of things to consider before you go tagging.

Be consistent: Establish a naming convention so that tags make sense, making them useful for everyone.

GTM has, in Ruth’s words, “a ton of built-in templates for commonly-used tags.” So make use of them. They’re shiny, and they have the added bonus of being easy to remove later.

If you want to get really truly, Tokyo Drift-style wild, you can customize. You’ll want to be proficient in JavaScript for this maneuver and get your jQuery on, but just think of all that lovely data.

What to do with said data?

Drive site redesign!

Track form abandonment!

See your users’ deepest thoughts and fears!

Ok, not so much that last one, but you can get useful, actionable data to study over time. And that’s what it’s about. Making use of the information available to you to make the web work better for customers, clients, partners – and yourself.

Speaking of data, next month DFWSEM will host Tyler Hakes who’ll talk about using public data to create amazing content. In the meantime, study Ruth’s deck. It’ll make you a better marketer, but we can’t guarantee it will make you a better driver.